[Beowulf] Go-playing machines

[Peter St. John]

Vincent,
FIDE Master is very cool :-) I'm only 2000; shodan in go.

The first move out of book may indeed be the move that matters most (in
chess) but in Go, the connection between the end of fuseki and the technique
of exploiting yose seems very remote. Since I can beat all computers at Go,
I assume it's remote for the machines also :-) because the correct valuation
of "influence" vs "territory" seems intractable.

1.e4

Peter

On 6/24/08, Vincent Diepeveen <diep at xs4all.nl> wrote:
>
> Hi Peter,
>
> At the risk of being off topic. A few points.
>
> First of all we must distinguish computers and humans. For chess and go
> this is completely the same:
> the choices that get made at start of the game decide its outcome with a
> high degree of certainty;
>
> In computer chess i launched the slogan a few years ago:
>        "the move that matters most for the game is the first move out of
> book"
>
> Being a titled player myself  (FIDE master),
> this was of course easy to judge and it still is the case.
>
> This might get explained especially because of the limited knowledge that a
> program has as compared to a human playing.
>
> At human level, if we look to what happens in go at the highest level, is
> that nearly all time gets spent the first few moves of the game.
>
> Chess and Go and 10x0 international checkers are all the same in that
> respect.
>
> The real strong titled players are that strong that it is relative easy for
> them to play the last few moves based upon technique to assure the win,
> as opposed to the start of the game when 'book theory' ends. In go of
> course that last is rather soon.
>
> Vincent
>
> On Jun 24, 2008, at 10:15 PM, Peter St. John wrote:
>
>  Vincent,
>>
>> I found your reply very agreable except this:
>>
>> "The first few moves in go decide the outcome of the game already, as the
>> rest is just a 'playout' of the first few moves. So what matters most is the
>> first few moves in the game."
>>
>> Many professional games are decided in the endgame. When I lose at chess,
>> it's almost always resignation within 50 moves; when I lose at go, it's
>> frequently necessary to count, less frequently resignation (but handicaps
>> make more games close), and I think I never resign before move 150 or so. In
>> fact, some crazy mathematicians proved that the endgame in go is very
>> tricky, see http://senseis.xmp.net/?TemperatureCGT (using "temperature"
>> from combinatorial game theory).
>>
>> As it happens I'm really bad at fuseki, and often have to catch up with
>> fighting in the middle game, which often leads to resentful squeezing of the
>> yose :-) So I rarely have quick games.
>>
>> Peter
>>
>>
>>
>
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